Could spell trouble? Scrabble rule change allows use of 'OK'

Hold on to your tiles: the first new Scrabble words in four years are being added to the official list of accepted words, including – heretically for some purists – the two-letter word “OK”.

The new edition of Collins Official Scrabble Words adds 2,862 words to the existing 276,000, allowing players who have pored over the new list to rack up an impressive 20 points if they manage to put down “yowza”, 22 if they can fit “genderqueer” anywhere, or 12 for “fleek”.

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Other words added to the official Scrabble list

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zomboid: resembling a zombie (21 points)

bezelless: without a bezel (20 points)

qapik: monetary unit of Azerbaijan (20 points)

hackerazzo: person who hacks a celebrity’s personal computer (27 points)

scrunchin: small crisp piece of fried pork fat (16 points)

sammie: sandwich (10 points)

bae: sweetheart or lover (5 points)

shebagging: when a female passenger places her bag on the seat beside her (18 points)

ume: sour Japanese fruit (5 points)

extropian: believer in extropy (18 points)

Photograph: Photos 12 / Alamy/www.alamy.com

OK is one of three new two-letter words, the first added to the official list since 2007. The others are “ew” – an “expression of disgust” joining eew and eeew in the dictionary – and “ze”, defined as a gender-neutral pronoun. The dictionary is approved for all English-language play outside the US and is compiled using the language database of the Collins Corpus.

Four-time national Scrabble champion Philip Nelkon welcomed the addition of new two-letter words, calling them the “lifeblood of high-score Scrabble, enabling us to make those high-scoring parallel plays involving many words”. However, he said that OK was a controversial choice among players, as according to the official rules, it should not be allowed due to being both capitalised and an abbreviation.

The OED gives its origin as the mid-19th century, and says it is probably an abbreviation of “orl korrect”, a humorous form of “all correct”, which was popularised as a slogan during President Van Buren’s re-election campaign of 1840 in the US: “his nickname Old Kinderhook (derived from his birthplace) provided the initials.”

Collins language content consultant Helen Newstead said that OK is considered “a noun, a verb, an adjective, and an adverb. No one thinks of it as an initialism anymore.”

Brett Smitheram, who describes Scrabble as “adrenaline sport” and won the 2016 Scrabble World Championship with words including the 176-pointer “braconid”, meaning a parasitic wasp, said the inclusion would be “one of the most impactful changes” to the game, because it ends with “K”.

“It used to be that if you put a K down, you knew your opponent couldn’t play across the top of it – it will be a change of mindset,” he said. He predicted the inclusion would outrage some fans, but “that’s the joy of it”.

“OK is no longer associated with being an acronym and has become lexicalised as a term in its own right. Compare it with IQ, which many still realise stands for ‘intelligence quotient’ … would you know what OK stands for outside of its meaning as a standalone word?” said Smitheram.

“Its inclusion has caused discussion, both strategically and lexicographically. But it’s like octopi, which is listed in the dictionary as ‘not the plural of octopus’. It is in common enough use that it’s worthy of note – and that’s the case with OK.”

OK only brings six points with it, but new words using Z and X, such as dox, vax and zen, will be more useful to players. Smitheram predicted that competitive players will be “swotting up” the new list of words, as it will be adopted into competitive Scrabble from July.

“If they don’t know they can use ze or bingeable and their opponent does, they might miss a trick,” he said.

Scrabble was dreamed up in the 1930s by out-of-work American architect Alfred Mosher Butts, who wanted to create a word game with scoring. According to legend, he used the front page of the New York Times to make his calculations for letter distribution. Turned down by established games manufacturers, he teamed up with games entrepreneur James Brunot and together they came up with the name Scrabble . According to toy company Hasbro, they started out by stamping letters on wooden tiles one at a time, turning out 12 games an hour. By the early 1950s, Scrabble had taken off. According to Hasbro, it can be found in three of every five US homes.